Opening Hours

The Night Visitor

by lucy atkins

This seductively creepy and gripping psychological drama opens at a scene quite familiar to staff and customers of this shop. We’re at the launch party of a hotly anticipated book by an illustrious TV academic. But, from the offset, we are unsettled: while her guests toast her brains, her flair, her lucky, lucky life, our author is more than a bit rattled and her family, while present in body, clearly aren’t there in spirit. The book in question, a biography […]

This seductively creepy and gripping psychological drama opens at a scene quite familiar to staff and customers of this shop. We’re at the launch party of a hotly anticipated book by an illustrious TV academic.

But, from the offset, we are unsettled: while her guests toast her brains, her flair, her lucky, lucky life, our author is more than a bit rattled and her family, while present in body, clearly aren’t there in spirit.

The book in question, a biography of a young Victorian widow who became one of the country’s first female doctors, is the result of meticulous research and is based on a diary in which she confesses the murder of her husband, a crime which has hitherto lain secret.

The trouble is that the meticulous research isn’t actually Olivia’s; instead she has been happy to hand over the backroom work to Vivian, buttoned up housekeeper at the crumbling country house that was once home to the subject of Olivia’s book and who was, we eventually discover, the first to bring the diary to Olivia’s attention.

So, as Olivia embroiders and makes media-friendly the diarist’s prose and skates along the surface of her apparently glamorous life–should she accept the BBC’s offer to leave academia even further behind and do a telly dance competition? Are there enough bedrooms at the beautiful house in France she’s hiring for she and her friends?–she entrusts Vivian with guardianship of all the basic facts of the book.

And as cracks begin to appear in the gloss of her life–her husband’s follow-up to his international bestseller is about a decade overdue, her teenage son is withdrawing and developing worrying habits, the family’s finances are under enormous strain despite her earning power– Olivia begins to realise that she has taken her eyes off the ball and taken a whole lot of things at face value in both her private and professional lives

Lucy Atkins ramps up the tension between these unlikely collaborators beautifully to the extent that at the very moment she should be allowing herself a moment to celebrate her work and her life, Olivia is actually spinning out of control. And, just when the reader feels they know where this is all heading, there is, of course, the most delicious sting in the tail of this creepy, brilliantly paced and almost Du Maurier-eque chiller